The presently disclosed subject matter relates to computer fonts and how they are used to produce hardcopy documents via a printer. Fonts are an important part of desktop publishing. When composing a written document in Microsoft Office Word™, Apple iWork Pages™, OpenOffice Writer™, or most any other publishing tool, multiple fonts are available to the user to describe how his/her words should appear on the screen and on paper. Each time a document is printed to make a hardcopy, the inkjet, laser, or other printer technology consumes ink, toner, or some other sort of print compound. Print compound such as black ink costs several cents per page of text.
When working with the characters, numbers, and symbols (hereinafter “glyphs”), collections of glyphs of similar style (hereinafter a “font”), and collections of related fonts (hereinafter a “family”), it is important to understand an element of visual design. With typography, as in other visual disciplines, there is interplay between positive and negative space. Positive space is where an image's main point of interest is, whereas negative space is all that is not a primary element. For typography in general, and font glyphs specifically, a character is commonly represented as a black symbol on a white background. The black elements are the positive space whereas the white areas are the negative space. Typically negative space is larger than positive space for a given work. The following references relate to positive and negative space in printing:
U.S. Pat. No. 6,609,776 B2 for INKJET PRINTING SYSTEM WITH INK-EFFICIENT FONT to Ames, et al. (hereinafter “Ames”) provides a high throughput printing system that can use a hybrid ink-efficient font. Intended for producing point-of-sale (“POS”) receipts, the system described produces alphanumeric characters “defined by a single sequence of marking dots.” By nature of POS receipts and their short-lived use, an additive approach to making an efficient font is disclosed. That is, Ames discloses printing only the minimum number of ink dots necessary to generate a minimally legible receipt.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,699,172 for IMAGE FORMING APPARATUS AND METHOD HAVING A TONER AND INK SAVING FEATURE to Hattori et al (hereinafter “Hattori”) discloses an ink, saving feature that is built into a printer processor. The feature is content agnostic in that it will attempt to make bitmap image data, sent from an external device to a printing device, conserve ink by reforming the bitmap image data in such a way as to retain parts of the image that are most distinct while decreasing ink output to areas of the image that are determined, by machine, to be less distinct. However, by indiscriminately reforming bitmap data based on a machine's interpretation of what areas of the bitmap data are to be conserved, the user of the system is left without control as to which particular elements of the printed document should be left unaffected and which should use an ink saving feature.
InkSaver 2.0™ (http://www.inksaver.com) is a product by Software Imaging, of the United Kingdom, that does not redesign fonts but instead makes all printed materials, such as fonts but also including images, diagrams, and other non-text objects, in lighter shades of gray to conserve black ink/toner. By indiscriminately making fonts less black and more gray, InkSaver 2.0™ decreases a document's readability.
One product that seeks to conserve print compound by focusing solely on an efficient computer font is Ecofont™ (http://www.ecofont.com), by SPRANQ, of the Netherlands. Ecofont™ contains a series of similarly-sized circles and claims approximately 20% ink/toner conservation compared to a font that does not contain the circles.